Playing a little catchup

My mom posted recently on a particular squirrel visitor we have.

I promised in the comments that I would post the squirrel "caught on camera"... just not quite caught climbing the wall. I've seen him do it, but this last time, even though the camera was right there and ready, I was laughing too hard to react quick enough and snap.
I see him as saying, yeah, I know this is for the birds, ya got a problem with that?

Nearly a month ago, I posted that I thought spring was here. I was a bit premature, as a week later we had bitter cold again and then 2 weeks of rain. Well, that's a bit of an exaggeration. Bitter cold in California speak is lows in the 30s. It's all relative though :) And for 2 weeks of rain, technically that just meant over the last two weeks it has rained nearly every day. For a place that gets 300 sunny days a year, that's a lot of rain.

But now I think it's safe to say... Spring is here.




Freesia
then
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Freesia
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Here's an updated pic of the front yard beginning to bloom and fill out. I can't wait for the wisteria (at top left) to start blooming. The buds are swelling as I type :) By early summer this whole yard will be green and lush. The lantana will be spreading, the wisteria will cover it's fence, and the ornamental grasses will be full height again. We just chopped them back a week or so ago.

Ignore the bare drip lines showing... someone still hasn't gotten around to the job he started last summer of replacing the rock mulch with woodchips or tanbark. Hope it's done before summer hits or these plants are gonna roast.

For my Valentines (you the readers)

WARNING: this post is full of pics, so if you have a slow speed it'll take forever to load. If you can get it thru Google Reader you might be better off.

I think I'll post some more roses I never got to a month ago. I think I'm on the front yard now. We have quite a few, but 3 "prize" roses. Prize to me anyhow. I love them and specifically chose them in a matching color scheme of reds to oranges to yellow-orange to go with our southwest feel. They are awesome, but I can't seem to take a picture that represents what my eye sees. I think I bounce from bloom to bloom and ignore the spacing between the blooms.
This one above is about the best rendition... the collection below is what my mind's eyes see :)
This is the Cancun Rose. I can't ever seem to find it in the books, let alone at online plant stores. But that is it's name. It's blooms are nice, but its best feature is the leaves. They are a nice deep green and somewhat shiny. They also do a great job at resisting powdery mildew.
The Cancun also has a really tight cluster of petals and it seems to be a double rose.
This is the Desert Peace. This image I took a few years ago with my Kodak P&S and had put a dark green board behind it. It was tricky to do and shoot at the same time, but I love the darkness. I've almost replicated that using my DSLR now, but not quite.
It is a gorgeous flowering plant, but its leaves tend to get powdered mildew. It has a light green and dullish leaf. But the blooms really take your eyes away from all that. The blooms vary in colors throughout the year, but are a combo of yellow, pink, magenta. Originally, the darkest part was more of a deep red. For some reason it's turning pinkish.

There was one bloom this year that looked so much like sherbet that I couldn't help but take it's picture. I know it's a rose, but my mouth waters every time I see this picture. Crazy, huh?
This is the Mojave rose. It's another one I have a difficult time finding online and in books. At one point this year it also started turning pinkish. I don't know what we are feeding them to do that. I thought that was only hydrangeas that did that. It really goes with our house color now too.
It has nice green glossy leaves, but they also have a terrible time with powdered mildew. Over the summer, my dad did a pretty good job keeping up with that and spraying them with some simple recipe of baking soda and water and maybe something else that we found online that really works. We end up having to pick off a bunch of leaves to give it good circulation, but that's okay because look at the blooms!
This one has to be my favorite because it's a single rose that opens up nice and wide so you can see it's innards. Check out the other-wordly images a macro with it can make!

Be sure to click on the individual pics to blow them up for the full effect. It's awesome.

Happy Valentines Day my dearest readers! I hope your day is as lovely as these roses.

Time for Spring?

It looks like spring has officially come to the San Francisco Bay Area, especially in our yard. I took these pictures just yesterday, and to compare to last year, they are exactly one month earlier than they should be.

Freesia

Last year, these flowers at this stage were just starting Feb 28th... today is February 2... probably not a good sign for our water supply since our rainy season is July to June and it really only rains from November to February.

Primrose

They are already talking water rationing for the North Bay where they grow the grapes for our awesome California wine. What I don't understand is why they haven't been calling for conservation for the last two years while the writing was on the wall that we will be hitting a water crisis.

Primrose

And I really don't understand why they are calling for water rationing in the area of my region where the population is the least. Perhaps I understand all too well. The politicians - or whoever is calling for this - are wusses who are afraid of the backlash of the residents who would complain, and figure they'll get less protests from an area with less residents.

Springstar

You know, if the general public were not spoiled with being allowed to build monster homes on a postage stamp lot and allowed to have lush lawns instead of drought-tolerant plants, we wouldn't even be having this crisis. What is worse, there are HOAs that force residents to have this "American Dream" look and keep their lawns and keep them green. ARGH!

And don't let me get started on the lawns and pools in Phoenix and Las Vegas!


Someone stop me before I get sanctimonious, but in the meantime, I'm feeling awfully smug about our choice of landscaping that we planted 7 years ago now. Na-na-na-na-naaa... we won't be spending a fortune saving a stupid design :p I'm also glad my parents were never fond of grass... mom's allergic and dad never wanted to mow, fertilize, and all the other garbage you have to do to keep it nice looking.

Before - take note of the parking strip. This is 2 years after my parents bought the house. A large Ash tree in the middle of the lawn had to be removed since it was diseased.

After

Last winter after we painted the house, but note the landscape at its least lush, still interesting. We get compliments year-round. But to improve it more, we plan to make swaths of rock mixed with swaths of tanbark - some wavy pattern.

Last summer's parking strip... completely filled in and exactly as I dreamed when I designed it. After two years it was pretty well filled in except for around the tree roots. That's wooly thyme in bloom (excellent lawn replacement) with Day Lilies and scattered seapinks.

Miniature Roses

Since we live in an area condusive to roses, we have quite a few miniature roses decorating our yard, mostly lining our pathway to the front door. For the most part, they aren't very good looking, but there are a few select blooms that stand out during the year.

This one below actually is one that is on our sideyard which was another inherited from the previous homeowner. If the weeds are cleared away, it stays pretty nice most of the spring and summer. It looks best in spring. It's a very pale yellow, later in the season it will be more white with occasional pink stripes from its neighbor mini rose I think.
This is the neighbor mini-rose. This one appears that it also has a little stray coloring of yellow from the pale yellow one. This one was pure pink the first year I saw it. It's now varying colors. I have no idea how that happens.
This is a gorgeous rose on a usually ugly plant. This is one lining our front walk. In this picture the leaves actually appear nice, so it must have been one of it's first blooms of the season. The mini roses really get inundated with powdered mildew.
This cute pink one looks large with the view. However, i used my super-widescreen lens (Sigma 10-20mm) and put the camera practically on the ground facing up. It was a fun experiment. I am pretty sure this mini-rose came from a batch which were used as decoration for an Easter breakfast a few years ago. They were going to go in the garbage, so we said we'd take them home. How people can toss perfectly good (and kinda expensive) plants is beyond me.
This mini rose I believe is called Candy Stripe. It is one my mom purchased specifically and it does pretty well. It's larger than most of the other mini roses.
We have many more. Perhaps this spring I'll take their pics and share with you all.

Pretty in Pink

More roses - not the movie, lol - although I wouldn't mind seeing it again. It's been a couple years.

This time it's our pink rose in the sideyard. It was planted about 5 feet away from the red rose in a previous post. Both of these roses - actually all in the sideyard - we inherited when my parents purchased the house back in 1999. They seem like they were planted a good 25 years ago, maybe more. I wonder how long rose bushes can live.

The pic above is the standard for this particular one. Again, we don't know it's name. It is a little fussier than the red one and stays about 3-4 feet high throughout the year. The scent is the traditional rose scent that you might find in a rose perfume.

There was one particular bud this year that was more than plain pink. It was gorgeous.

And a full screen view - I love this when it pops up in my screensaver.

This one was the more traditional pink and I tried to get a closeup of it's insides. But, this rose tends to stay very tight up until it starts dropping the petals, thus making it also a great cut rose - but no fun with the macro ;)

For those with just one rose bush

I will offer a sampling of our roses :) I have over 100 very good rose photos that I uploaded to Flickr, so I think I'll make separate posts over the next couple of weeks as I have the time.

We live in an area where our bushes can bloom for 10 months. Their only down time is late December to early February, with late January being our time to chop them back to stumps. Well, not that far down, but it's a severe pruning so they will grow the preferred directions during the year (not towards the inside).

A couple of posts ago, I posted a pic saying goodbye for the season to the roses. Here's a companion shot of that red rose.

I don't know what it's name is, but I think it has to do with Texas or Oklahoma. Someone once told me. It's a large bush that will easily surpass 6' in one growing season. The leaves are somewhat resistant to blackspot and powdery mildew, but require thinning out. Their thorns are humongous and painful :)

This is a shot of me looking up at it to get the perfectly blue sky behind it while trying to keep the sun out of the lens. A more normal angle would get either the fence or our neighbors roofline or big juniper in the view.

Even though it has painful thorns, it makes for an amazing long-stemmed cut rose. At it's best, it can rival a nursery's rose. It also has a wonderful fruity/spicy rose smell.

Goodbye roses

See you again in March (I hope). It's nice having them most of the year, but the best they look are early season or late season. Summers are too hot for them I think. However our area of California seems like a great place to grow them for their long seasons.

Did I ever???

I have this terrible memory, so I can't remember all the pictures I've shared on here...

So, did I ever share these?

And it's been a long while since I've posted flowers, so here's a few others :)

And I signed up for Flickr Pro now too, but I feel kinda guilty like I'm two-timing Webshots who I've been with forever. But I love that I can totally organize into sets and sets into collections and other collections into general collections. O_O an organizer's dream!

So you can find me here to add me to your contacts if you wish :)

Monterey Day

Last week my mom and I went down to Monterey to hang out. She hadn't seen the Brandt's Cormorants before and back in May I had.
Monday (the day we went) we saw lots of wildlife. More than I remembered from May. First was the harbor seals - they weren't there in May, then we noticed the brown pelicans and they were hanging out with a few Cormorants, and then after we walked over to the Coast Guard Pier where the Cormorants nesting site is, we noticed some smaller shorebirds never before noted by my mom - or myself if I kept track ;)

I'll post the wildlife in a subsequent post, but for now, here's some of the plant life we saw.

Rockrose - one of the Cistus species, but because I didn't get a good picture of the leaf structure and the overall plant, I couldn't identify which one.

Tree Mallow (Lavatera maritima) with Fleabane (again, which one, i don't know). The tree mallow I had originally guessed it was some kind of hibiscus - it certainly had the flowers for it. I think they are closely related, but specifically -although it is really a shrub, it's called Tree Mallow.

The water drops were likely from watering. There was no rain, but the marine layer was thick enough to leave mist on the windshield, so it might have been from that too.
A Matilija Poppy (Romneya coulteri) whose blooms were 5 or so inches across. Bees like the yellow globe in the middle.

Sea Lavender (Limonium perezii) - dime a dozen around here, but still beautiful. They make excellent cut flowers because they last forever - even when the water dries up... also make great dried flower arrangements.

Here's a closeup of the blooms.


There were of course more flowers, but these ones were in great shape and at their peak of blooming.

Wordless Wednesday

Various Yard Pics

Well, over the long weekend, I spent some time going through my photos. I'm still a bit behind in editing, but I made good progress. I also decided to start putting frames around my pictures to give them a nice finished look as well as titles. Some I left untitled because I have no idea what they are, or just wasn't thinking up a creative title.

Here's one I'm just not sure of at all. As with the others, click on it to enlarge.

It's so non-descript. It's sort-of small, note its relation to the size of those leaves. The leaves (of a tree i can't identify either) are about 3 inches long, so I guess the bird would be 6" beak to tail. I wonder if it's a titmouse fledgling... any ideas? Or, it could be a bushtit - although they are 3-3.5 inches... I just don't know, it's possible it was that small.

Here's an infrequent visitor. I saw him once before (at least I think it was him) back in May.

He's shaking his head in this picture. How funny looking.

I finally found out what this is, so I'll post it. It's really tiny, but obviously looks big here.

Anthrenus verbasci - variegated carpet beetle

And last week I picked up a copy of Kaufman's Butterfly Field Guide and discovered that this was an American Lady... appropriate considering where I snapped it :)